The season of fashion revivals In Milan and Paris the big names of fashion of the past are returning

The history of fashion is a story of courses and recourses – and just as fashion trends come and go, the big fashion brands also live strange lives. Leafing through an old edition of Vogue, let's say from the 80s, the modern reader could be faced with names of big brands that, today, do not enjoy the same notoriety. Precisely those brands, however, this year have returned or are about to return: if in France this season of great revivals began during the pandemic and will reach full speed with the next fashion week, in Italy too the houses of the past are rediscovering the archives and finding new and young creative directors who bring them in step with the present. Without a doubt, one of the most anticipated revivals of February is that of Trussardi, a century-old brand that in the 80s was brought into vogue by Nicola Trussardi and that maintained its success over the years while diluting its strength in the thousand streams of its diffusion lines; another great return announced in recent days is that of Balestra, a couture maison in Rome that in the 60s dressed the jet-set and the royal houses of half the world but then gradually disappeared against the background of an industry that never stands still. The same, in recent years, has happened with Patou and Courregés in Paris following the imprinting of Daniel Rosenberry from Schiapparelli, whose real rebirth began only in 2019.

The name of these commercial giants of the past still retains its ancient prestige and therefore still hides great commercial opportunities, as well as great possibilities for their creative directors to operate in a sort of safe zone, achieving great success in most cases: Daniel Rosenberry, Nicolas Di Felice, Guillame Henry have found fame and fortune becoming the protagonists of the revivals of the brands they lead – and fashion bookmakers predict that the same will happen to Serhat Işık and Benjamin A. Huseby with Trussardi, given the growing success of GmbH since its debut in 2017. The most interesting part of the whole process is that the format of the revival of a historic brand is a sort of win win for which, on the one hand, new creatives are given the opportunity to make their voices heard and, on the other, it prevents the heritage built in years of hard work by the founders of those same brands from being wasted in neglect,  thus ensuring a sense of continuity to all parts of the fashion industry.